This is Part 25 of 47 in HorizonDesk's chronological series on Indian history, from the Stone Age to Independence in 1947. It follows Part 24: The Rajputs and Early Medieval North India.
Islam reached India in three different ways. It came first by sea, with Arab merchants who settled peacefully in the ports of the western coast. It came next by land in 711 to 712, when an Arab army conquered Sindh. And three centuries later it came with Turkish rulers from Afghanistan: first the raiding armies of Mahmud of Ghazni, then the conquering armies of Muhammad Ghori, whose victory at Tarain in 1192 opened the way to the Delhi Sultanate.
This history is often retold through today's politics, so this part stays close to the sources and sets out the main scholarly views fairly. Many dates are approximate.
Before the armies: Arab traders on the western coast
Arab and Persian merchants were sailing to India long before Islam, trading in pepper, textiles and horses. From the 7th century many of them were Muslims, and they settled in ports such as Kollam, Kodungallur and Calicut in Kerala, Chaul and Sanjan on the Konkan coast, and Cambay in Gujarat.
- The Kollam (Tharisapalli) copper plates of about 849 carry witness signatures in Arabic (Kufic), Middle Persian and Hebrew script.
- The Arab writer known as Sulaiman the Merchant (c. 851) called the Rashtrakuta king, the "Balhara", the friendliest of Indian kings to the Arabs, and the Sanjan plates of 926 even mention a Tajik (Arab or Persian) governor of Sanjan under the Rashtrakutas.
- Kerala tradition links the Cheraman Juma Masjid at Kodungallur to a Chera king who converted and sailed to Arabia. This is a later legend, but it shows how long-standing the coastal links were remembered to be.
For most people in peninsular India, the first Muslims they met were merchants and sailors, not soldiers.
Muhammad bin Qasim and the conquest of Sindh, 711 to 712
Sindh, on the lower Indus, was ruled by Raja Dahir of a Brahmin dynasty based at Aror. The Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, sent his young kinsman Muhammad bin Qasim, then about 17, with an army by land and sea. The pretext in later accounts was the seizure of ships carrying Muslim women near the port of Debal by pirates whom Dahir would not punish; control of the sea route and Indus wealth also mattered.
In 711 the army stormed Debal with a giant catapult. In 712 Dahir was defeated and killed near Raor, and Brahmanabad, Aror and finally Multan, with its famous sun temple, were taken. The settlement was pragmatic: in return for the jizya tax, Hindus and Buddhists were treated broadly as protected subjects, and many temples, Multan's included, stayed open because they brought revenue. After Hajjaj died in 714, Muhammad bin Qasim was recalled and died in prison in 715. Arab rule in Sindh lasted about three centuries but spread little further.
The Chachnama debate
Most of the colourful detail about the conquest, including the tale that Dahir's daughters later brought about Muhammad bin Qasim's death, comes from the Chachnama, a Persian text written around 1226, five centuries after the events, by Ali Kufi at Uch. He said he was translating an older Arabic book.
Historians once used the Chachnama as a straightforward chronicle. Manan Ahmed Asif, in A Book of Conquest (2016), argues that it is better read as a 13th-century work of political advice for the court of Nasir al-Din Qabacha, and that its claim to be a translation is partly a literary device; Finbarr Barry Flood has likewise stressed how much such texts reflect their own time. Others accept that it preserves some genuine earlier traditions. Either way it is not an eyewitness record, and modern claims that the conquest was uniquely brutal, or uniquely tolerant, often lean too heavily on it.
The Arabs held back
From Sindh, Arab governors raided east into Rajasthan, Malwa and Gujarat in the 720s and 730s, and were turned back. The Gwalior inscription of Mihira Bhoja credits the Pratihara Nagabhata I with crushing a "mleccha" army, usually taken to mean the Arabs, and the Navsari plates of 739 record that the Chalukya prince Avanijanashraya Pulakeshin defeated the "Tajikas" in Gujarat.
The Gurjara-Pratiharas, whose contest with the Palas and Rashtrakutas we followed in Part 22: The Tripartite Struggle for Kannauj, remained a barrier for two centuries; Arab writers described their king as hostile to Islam and strong in cavalry. The Rashtrakutas, rivals of the Pratiharas, preferred good relations with the Arabs. Indian politics did not divide simply along religious lines.
The Ghaznavids and Mahmud's seventeen raids
Sabuktigin, a Turkish former slave soldier, became ruler of Ghazni in 977 and fought the Hindu Shahi king Jayapala, who ruled from Udabhandapura (Hund) on the Indus. Sabuktigin's son Mahmud (r. 998 to 1030) defeated Jayapala near Peshawar in 1001, and Jayapala's son Anandapala in 1008 or 1009.
Tradition counts seventeen expeditions by Mahmud into India between about 1000 and 1027, though the number varies between sources. Targets included Nagarkot (Kangra) in 1009, Thanesar around 1014 and Mathura and Kannauj in 1018, when the Pratihara king Rajyapala fled. Apart from Punjab, annexed around 1021, Mahmud did not try to rule India. Temples were targeted above all because they were treasuries as well as symbols of royal power. The plunder made Ghazni a brilliant court city, where Firdausi presented the Shahnama. His chroniclers praised him as a holy warrior, yet he employed Indian troops and commanders, and his Lahore coins carried a Sanskrit legend.
Somnath, 1025 to 1026, and its many histories
In late 1025 Mahmud crossed the Thar desert, and in January 1026 he sacked the temple of Somnath, a great Shiva shrine on the Saurashtra coast in the Chaulukya kingdom of Gujarat. Persian accounts describe a fierce defence, a massacre, the breaking of the linga and vast plunder.
How Somnath was remembered is itself serious history. In Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (2004), Romila Thapar compares Persian chronicles, Sanskrit inscriptions, Jain texts and colonial writing. She notes that Persian accounts grew more elaborate over time, that Sanskrit sources say surprisingly little about the raid, and that the temple was soon active again: Kumarapala rebuilt it around 1169, and a 1264 inscription records local Hindu notables helping a merchant from Hormuz build a mosque nearby. She argues that Somnath as a lasting "national trauma" owes much to an 1843 House of Commons debate over the so-called "Somnath gates". Critics say she underplays the violence. Most historians accept both: the raid was destructive, and its meaning was later reshaped by colonial and nationalist politics.
Richard Eaton, in "Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States" (2000), argues that temple desecration in this era was mostly political, aimed at the royal temples of enemy kings, and notes that Indian kings had long seized each other's cult images as trophies. His approach, and his relatively modest count of cases, are debated, but it has shaped how many historians read the evidence.
Al-Biruni's Kitab al-Hind
This violent period also produced a book of patient learning. The Central Asian scholar al-Biruni (973 to c. 1052) was brought to Ghazni by Mahmud and accompanied his campaigns. He learned Sanskrit, and around 1030 completed his Kitab al-Hind, "Verifying All That the Indians Recount, the Reasonable and the Unreasonable". It describes Indian philosophy, religion, astronomy, mathematics and customs. He could be critical, writing that Indians believed no country or science was like theirs, but he was equally frank that Mahmud's raids had "utterly ruined the prosperity of the country".
Muhammad Ghori and the battles of Tarain
By the 12th century the Ghaznavids held little more than Punjab. Their successors came from Ghur in central Afghanistan: the brothers Ghiyath al-Din and Muizz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam, known in India as Muhammad Ghori, took Ghazni in 1173. Ghori captured Multan and Uch in 1175, but in 1178 he was badly defeated near Mount Abu by the Chaulukya army of the boy-king Mularaja II, a victory Indian sources credit to the queen-mother Naikidevi. He turned north instead and took Lahore from the last Ghaznavid in 1186.
At the First Battle of Tarain in 1191, near Thanesar, Prithviraj III (Prithviraj Chauhan) of Ajmer, leading a coalition of Rajput rulers, defeated Ghori, who was wounded. Ghori returned in 1192 with a larger army of mounted archers. At the Second Battle of Tarain, feigned retreats wore down the Indian army before a decisive charge broke its centre. Prithviraj was captured and later executed; coins suggest he may briefly have ruled Ajmer as a vassal first. The Prithviraj Raso story that the blinded king shot Ghori in Ghazni is legend: Ghori died in 1206.
Delhi was occupied in 1192 to 1193. In 1194 at Chandawar, near Etawah, Ghori's army defeated and killed the Gahadavala king Jayachandra (Jaichand). Later legend made Jaichand a traitor who invited Ghori, built on the Raso's romance of his daughter Samyogita; contemporary evidence does not support this.
Qutb-ud-din Aibak, Bakhtiyar Khalji and Nalanda
Ghori ruled India through his slave generals. Qutb-ud-din Aibak took charge at Delhi and went on to capture Gwalior and, in 1202 to 1203, Kalinjar. In Delhi he began the Quwwat al-Islam mosque, whose inscription says it used material from 27 temples, and the first storey of the Qutb Minar around 1199; see our Qutub Minar guide. When Ghori was assassinated on the Jhelum in 1206, Aibak became the first ruler of what we call the Delhi Sultanate.
Further east, Bakhtiyar Khalji raided Bihar and Bengal. The historian Minhaj-i Siraj, writing some 60 years later, describes the capture of a fortified "Bihar" whose shaven-headed residents were killed and whose library showed it was a college; this is usually identified with Odantapuri, sacked around 1193 to 1200. Around 1204 Bakhtiyar surprised the Sena king Lakshmana Sena at Nadia.
The fate of Nalanda needs care. Minhaj does not name it. The Tibetan monk Dharmasvamin, visiting in 1234 to 1236, found Nalanda damaged and raided again, yet still teaching a small group of students. Most historians see the raids as a severe blow to monasteries already weakened by lost royal patronage and the decline of Buddhism in India, not a single event that ended Nalanda overnight. Our Nalanda Mahavihara guide covers the site today.
Why did the north Indian kingdoms lose?
No single explanation is enough. Older views blaming caste or "decadence" are now largely rejected. Scholars today point to:
- Cavalry: Ghurid armies were built around Central Asian mounted archers with access to the best horse-breeding lands, a frontier advantage stressed by Andre Wink and others.
- Fragmentation: as Part 24 showed, the northern kingdoms fought each other constantly, and coalitions like the one in 1191 were temporary.
- Organisation: Ghori's slave commanders owed loyalty directly to him, while Indian armies were assembled from the contingents of semi-independent samantas.
- Contingency: Ghori also lost, in 1178 and 1191. Leadership and timing mattered as much as any structural weakness.
Satish Chandra and Romila Thapar both warn against reading this as a simple clash of religions: rulers fought and allied regardless of faith, and the conquerors relied on Indian soldiers and administrators.
Key takeaways
- Islam came first through peaceful Arab trade on the western coast, then through the Arab conquest of Sindh in 711 to 712.
- Mahmud of Ghazni raided rather than ruled; the meaning of his 1026 sack of Somnath is still debated.
- Ghori's victory at Tarain in 1192 and his generals' conquests laid the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206.
Next part
In Part 26, we turn to The Delhi Sultanate: Slave Dynasty and the Khiljis, from Qutb-ud-din Aibak, Iltutmish and Razia Sultan to Alauddin Khalji and his armies in the south.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Muizz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Battles of Taraori
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, al-Biruni
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Qutb Minar and its Monuments, Delhi
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara at Nalanda, Bihar
- Thapar, R. (2004), Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History, Penguin Viking
- Eaton, R. M. (2000), "Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States", Journal of Islamic Studies 11(3)
- Asif, M. A. (2016), A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia, Harvard University Press
- Flood, F. B. (2009), Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter, Princeton University Press
- Wink, A. (1990), Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, Vol. 1, Brill
- Kumar, S. (2007), The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192 to 1286, Permanent Black
- Chandra, S. (2004), Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals, Part One, Har-Anand
- Thapar, R. (2002), Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, University of California Press
- Sachau, E. C. (trans.) (1888), Alberuni's India, Trubner
